The side-scrolling “Metroidvania” genre has seen some tough times. Virtually abandoned by its namesakes in favor of first-person or third-person 3D iterations, it has surprisingly found a home on Xbox Live Arcade. From Shadow Complex to Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, and now Dust: An Elysian Tail, Metroidvanias seem alive and well on the service. READ MORE
MMOs are too large in scope to be covered by our traditional review process. So here’s what we’re doing instead: giving you a “first draft” with thoughts from the initial days of a world, then circling back in a few weeks with a fleshed-out look at the final game and high-level experience.
The term “free-to-play” is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to MMOs these days. Many of them are initially free, though most often, you cannot have the same experience without paying for something. Often dropping a monthly fee and going for microtransactions is seen by the community as the last resort of an unsuccessful game. In my experience, this is not always true, as I know of several games that have done this with great success. READ MORE
In the My Favorite Game series, get to know us better as staff writers share the game they love most and why.
Part of what really makes a game fun for me is an open-ended experience. Probably one of the reasons I play so many PC games is that, either by design or through modding, many games offer me this sort of thing, while console entries prefer to have a much more defined beginning, middle and end. READ MORE
If vampires tend to feel a bit overused recently, it’s generally because they are. Thanks to certain major motion pictures, books and video games, they have become a popular topic for fiction. While overusing a theme is nothing new for the industry, in the case of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim‘s Dawnguard expansion, it fits the setting. Namely, it’s an aspect of Skyrim that wasn’t covered too much in the main game, save for a few side quests or nameless enemies suffering from vampirism. it isn’t covered in much depth aside from the fact that they exist. READ MORE
Kingdom Hearts is one of the oddest collaborations in gaming. For a game that began through a chance encounter in an elevator, it’s become one of Square Enix’s most beloved games, and one of Disney’s most successful forays into the industry (despite a good track record). While the series has had a few ups and downs, it remains a clear example of how a collaborative effort can lead to great success, and this remains true in this first entry on the 3DS. READ MORE
